


even dust was made to settle

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Multi, OT4, Polyamory, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 09:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9996335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: They lose the war, but their story doesn't end there.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'The Projectionist' by Sleeping At Last.
> 
> Spoilers through to 4x05.

Nassau recedes, turning into smoke on the horizon.

He is a hollow man. Who has he been but the desire to make something of Nassau? To build something from the broken pieces of dreams once dreamt in a city halfway across the world? To exact payment from the system that shattered those dreams?

He had almost achieved it. Almost.

He stands at the rail. All that he is dissolves into seawater and sloshes down the side of the ship.

Then he is in the cabin. He does not know why he is there, why he is still flesh and bone and taking up space in this ship. Madi is sitting down on the bed, beside him, wringing a cloth and pressing it to his forehead. It comes away red with blood. He remembers now that he would not let anyone else touch him and tend to his wounds. But Madi is here, and she is touching him, one hand on his shoulder as she cleans his face. Something stings, but he does not make any noise.

“John has something he wishes to tell you,” Madi says. The cloth slips behind his ear, caressing the shell of it.

The door opens, and Silver is stepping inside in that swinging way of his. The thud of the crutch and the hop of his foot. Madi gets up, but Flint says, voice hoarse and thin like it belongs to somebody else, “Stay. Please.”

Madi sits down again. Silver perches on a table, hands resting on his crutch, his fingers drumming. He is more hesitant than usual, and it takes him a long time to say anything, but then he says, “I think it’s possible Thomas Hamilton might still be alive,” and Flint is glad Madi is still in the room, or his heart might have leapt out of his own body. Madi’s presence has always calmed him somehow, and here she is now, her arm pressing mildly against his, as he stares at Silver.

* * *

They’re outside the stone walls of the compound. He and Silver. Madi is waiting for Silver aboard the ship. Silver is here, looking at him like the moon looks at the earth, with the softest light. “He’ll be inside,” Silver says. “You’ll find him. It’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”

Flint is desperate with it, desperate with how much he loves this man before him. Hair wild like a thicket of briars Flint would gladly make his home in even if it meant bleeding every day.

“Go,” Silver murmurs, a fist closed around his sleeve as though he is trying to keep him even at the same time as telling him to go. “Go.”

His fist does not loosen, not at all.

Flint does not know if he will ever see Silver again. There is so much he has never said, and may never get to say.

He goes, wresting himself from Silver’s grasp. And it feels like that. It feels, as he goes, as the distance between them widens, that his entire body, his whole being had been cocooned inside Silver’s closed fist before, that all this time, these past months, this past _year_ Silver had been holding him tight in the warm darkness of his hand, and now that fist is opening, those fingers falling away.

He does not turn back. He goes.

* * *

He sees hair that is brighter gold than he remembers, but then the man turns around, and it is. It is Thomas.

* * *

He gets Thomas out of there. It’s so easily done, he wants to weep. Thomas has been here the past eleven years and he has not known it. Just days from Nassau. All these years he had only been a few days away. Flint could have gone and rescued him thousands of times over.

They walk. Away from the sea they walk, further and further from town. They walk for hours until night falls, not saying anything to each other. They come across a farm in the dimming twilight: fenced fields of animals and barns and stables and a house with a chimney. They’ve not passed much else on their way, and it doesn’t seem like there will be much else soon if they keep walking, and so they creep into one of the barns and sit down by the haystacks.

Flint has a bag with him. There’s some bread and salted meat, which he splits with Thomas. It’s dark in the barn: Flint has left the door half-open so some moonlight spills in, but he can barely see anything with only that slice of light cutting through the murk. His hands brush against Thomas’ as they share the food. He can hear himself chewing. He can hear Thomas chewing.

“Can I hope that you might say _something_ to me before dawn tomorrow?” Thomas asks. 

Flint doesn’t know what to say. “She’s dead,” he says, after a while. It’s a fact that still startles him. That gap in the world where she no longer exists. Every time he thinks of it it’s like walking down the stairs and suddenly finding a step missing, catching himself just before he plunges into the abyss where that step once was.

Thomas makes a very small noise. “I thought you both were. I was told you’d been executed and she’d hanged herself out of grief.”

“She got shot in front of me,” Flint says. “Goddamn Peter Ashe. Fucking rat. Told me he’d seen you in Bedlam and apologised to you and you’d _forgiven_ him. Fucking—” He stops. There aren’t any words vile enough to describe the man Ashe was.

“Peter?” Thomas asks, though he doesn’t sound very surprised.

“Betrayed us all.”

“Flint,” Thomas says, and it is the strangest sensation hearing that name from his mouth, like being enveloped in cold mist. “You’re Captain Flint. That was what Charles Town was all about. We heard about it even in our cosy little prison, of course.”

“Yes,” Flint says. “I ran my sword through him.”

“Through Peter?”

Flint grunts his affirmation, running his fingertips over prickly hay. “I killed your father, too. Years before that.” He might as well get this all over with. If Thomas is horrified and never wants to have anything to do with him again, then let it happen now. “And his mistress. I would have spared her, but in that moment I was too angry. I thought of you killing yourself in Bedlam, subject to such intolerable abuse, and I just… utterly lost control.” He closes his eyes. “I’ve killed so many people, Thomas. I snapped my friend’s neck because he was in the way of my only hope of reforming Nassau. I waged war against England and I lost. I did it all in your name, because I thought you were dead, and now that you’re alive… I can’t make any sense of the past eleven years of my life.”

There is silence. For an age there is silence, and then there is Thomas’ head on his shoulder.

* * *

The sky is only just beginning to lighten when he goes to steal food from the house. He enters the kitchen through the back door. A black cat with a white splodge of fur on its back comes up to him and rubs against his leg, and then prances away daintily. He loads his bag with items from the pantry, fruit and cheese and bread, dirt-covered carrots. 

He hears movement behind him and, thinking it is the cat again, turns around. It is not the cat, but a very quiet woman, who gasps when her candle illuminates the stranger in her house.

Stunned by the familiarity of the long brown hair and small pale face he sees in the candlelight, Flint drops his bag. Apples roll out of it. “Abigail,” he breathes.

“Mr McGraw,” Abigail says. “What on earth are you doing in my kitchen?”

Flint has thought of Abigail at times during the past year, wondered what became of her, but he was always too busy dealing with more urgent matters to dwell too long on this line of inquiry. He is very glad to see that she is alive, but…

“Apologies, but I was stealing your food, Miss Ashe,” he says.

Abigail’s gaze flickers down to the lolling apples. “Yes, I can see as much,” she says. “But why are you _here_?”

“I came to Savannah to rescue Thomas Hamilton,” he says. Abigail’s eyes widen.

“Lord Hamilton is _alive_?” she exclaims.

“He’s sleeping in your barn right now,” Flint says, “Miss Ashe.”

Abigail shakes her head. “We must invite him in at once! And _please_ , call me Abigail.”

Is this a good time to apologise for murdering her father? Flint frowns, feeling a little nauseous, but Abigail clasps his hand earnestly, and so he goes to retrieve Thomas from the barn.

* * *

Abigail shares the house with her husband and her husband’s sister, but she confesses that she in fact shares her bed not with her husband but with the sister—that she married her husband with this understanding between them.

Every time Flint thinks life can hold no more surprises for him, it continues to astonish.

Abigail was originally sent to Savannah to stay with a family friend, but when what was supposed to be a temporary stay turned into something longer, she met Sylvia and Sylvia’s brother, Henry, selling their produce at the town market, and a few months later she had fallen in love with Sylvia and married Henry and moved into their farm. The family friend, Abigail explains with a creased brow, was really quite horrible to her, and she is glad to have found Sylvia and Henry and a place where she finally feels she belongs. When Flint brings up the matter of her father, Abigail looks away, fixing her eyes on the wall, and asks, “You’re not actually sorry you killed him though, are you?”

Flint cannot answer that, but Abigail nods and says, “I think that were I you, I would not be sorry either. But I am me, and I miss him. He was not the best father, and I spent little time with him, but I miss him all the same.” She crushes the hem of her dress in her hand. “I miss Lady Hamilton, too.”

Sylvia and Henry prove very welcoming and kind to their unexpected guests; Flint and Thomas stay a week, before Henry brings them news that his cousin knows of a place where they might make a more permanent home.

So it is that Flint and Thomas move into their own house, a day’s ride away from Abigail’s, with their own plot of land. Technically it is owned by Henry’s cousin, but Henry’s cousin is too busy with other business in Port Royal to look after it properly.

They acquire goats, they sow seeds. Abigail visits for tea sometimes, on her own or bringing Sylvia, and occasionally Henry too.

* * *

They have been sleeping in separate rooms. Thomas leaves the door to his room open every night, but Flint is not ready yet.

And then, one night, he is. Thomas is sitting in bed reading a book, and James stands in his doorway, observing the flickering shadows on the walls, and says, “May I join you?”

Thomas looks up, his face open. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

Flint sits uncomfortably on the edge of the bed, but Thomas reaches out and clutches his hand. “At least come closer, now that you’re here,” Thomas coaxes, and Flint listens, drawing closer until they are shoulder to shoulder.

“After Miranda died,” Flint says, “I almost… destroyed myself. It felt like I didn’t have anything left in the world. Nobody knew who I was. _I_ didn’t know who I was. And then…”

It has been weeks since they set eyes on each other in Savannah, and in those weeks, they have spoken, in broad strokes, about the past eleven years of their lives. Flint has told Thomas about Admiral Hennessey’s parting remarks that still haunt him to this day. He has told Thomas about sailing to Nassau with Miranda, about becoming captain of a pirate crew, about the complicated pirate politics of Nassau and the girl who was the centre of it all. He has told Thomas about Gates, and Billy, and about the _Urca de Lima_. About the smiling little shit they picked up off a prize once who claimed to be a cook but was in fact nothing more than a thief. About how that thief became Long John Silver, pirate king. About Abigail, and their failed petition to Peter Ashe in Charles Town. About Teach and Vane and Rackham and Bonny. About the Maroons, and Madi. About Rogers, and the battle for Nassau, and the Spanish.

Where Flint has lived a life of uncertainty and danger, a life which daily crumbled and remade itself in a new and incomprehensible shape, Thomas’ life has been the opposite. The past eleven years have been stagnant and dull for him. He slept, he was fed, he laboured until he ached. Every day the same.

“We were not kept in cells,” Thomas said, once. “And since the disgraced sons of several families were gathered in one place, I was not wholly without entertainment.” A wry twist of lips. “Even more than touching them, though, being able to discourse with them on literature and philosophy and politics was what kept me sane. We were not allowed books.”

And Flint’s hand had trembled around the handle of his cup, as he glanced around their little kitchen in all its mundanity, the window that looked out on the muddy fields outside, and he said, “Am I not subjecting you to drudgery and boredom too? Would you not prefer to be back in society, among your peers and fellow intellectuals, at the centre of civilisation and enlightenment?”

And Thomas had reached out and touched his arm, lightly. “You are not subjecting me to anything,” he said. “This is no prison for me. I am free to go wherever I like. You do understand? I am free, and I am here with you. I do not desire to be anywhere else but here.”

And Flint had closed his eyes and thought of Miranda and all that he had kept her from by confining her to the interior of New Providence. He thought of her saying, _There is no life here. There is no joy here. There is no love here._ And he felt the warmth of Thomas’ hand on his arm, and he said, “You choose this.”

“I do, my love.”

So they have talked. They have taken their meals together, milked goats together, tilled the fields together, and talked. But Flint has not talked about _this_.

“Silver. Silver found me, somehow. Silver looked at me and saw who I was. All those years and I never told anybody about you. I think Miranda explained a little about our relationship to Abigail. But I never told anybody. And then Silver looked at me and he asked about _you_. Asked who I was fighting the war for, and I answered him honestly. He fought time and time again to keep me alive when I didn’t have any will to keep myself alive. He looked at me and saw something worth saving, when all anybody else ever saw was a monster.”

“Where is Mr Silver now?” Thomas asks, rubbing the knuckles of Flint’s fingers soothingly with his thumb.

“I don’t know,” Flint says. “He went with Madi. He learnt that you might still be alive, and he brought me to Savannah, and then he left. Said he had some unfinished business to attend to, and he’d come back and find me when it was all over. Told me to trust him.”

“And do you? Trust him?”

Flint turns to Thomas, blinks at him. Isn’t it clear that he trusts Silver? And then he realises something: he has unreservedly trusted Silver with his life in the past, but his life is not something he has ever much valued. But this time, it is not his life, but his _heart_ that he is entrusting to Silver, and try as he might, he is terrified that Silver will not come back. That Silver will find a pocket of peace in some corner of the world with Madi, and never think of him again.

He doesn’t know if he trusts Silver to come back.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. In the candlelight, Thomas’ eyes are like the sky in London, more grey than blue. He slides an arm around the back of Flint’s shoulders. “You love him,” Thomas says. “And… I think he loves you, too.”

“I think so, too,” Flint says, quietly, picking at the white scalloped trim on the pillowcase. It is an odd thing, to admit that out loud, that he thinks Silver loves him. He feels that he has loved Silver for so long, but he has never really thought about whether Silver loves him. They are what they are to each other, two men who have stuck with each other through so much that would have turned them against each other. Everyone was always expecting Silver to turn on him, and yet there Silver had been, doing his utmost to secure a future for Flint even when everything else went to Hell. Standing outside the prison which contained Thomas, holding onto Flint’s sleeve as if he never wanted to let go. “But he loves Madi as well. More than he loves me, perhaps.”

“It isn’t a thing that everyone can accept. The fact that one person cannot be everything to another. Many wish that that they in their single solitary personhood could be _enough_ for another. But I believe you and I both know one of the most important truths in life, which is that one person can never, _should_ never be wholly enough for another. It would be utter folly to attempt to live that way, for two souls to depend solely on each other and no one else.”

Flint smiles. Yes. He knows that. It was Thomas and Miranda who taught him that lesson. He has never believed that he could be everything to Silver. He has never wanted to be. But he wants to be _something_. Something more than he actually was. He wants to touch Silver’s cheek, to tangle his hand in Silver’s hair. He wants to kiss Silver, to read books with him, to wake up in the morning next to him.

He leans in closer to Thomas, and Thomas leans toward him too, until their foreheads are pressed together. It isn’t enough, but it is already so much more than he ever thought he would have. 

* * *

His hair is getting longer and longer, the reddish brown locks of it almost falling to his shoulder. He gets rid of his moustache and beard, keeping his face clean-shaven. When he looks in the mirror, he sees somebody who isn’t him. Somebody he once was, somebody he is trying to become. But it isn’t him, that face in the mirror with the smooth chin and the long hair.

He rides to the coast, sometimes. He wanted to walk away from the sea, but the sea still calls to him. The ocean has been a constant companion to him for most of his life—he finds he cannot abandon it so easily. He stands with his toes in the sand, feeling the way it shifts as the cool waves wash over his feet. The salt air agitates him, stirs something beneath his skin, something that longs to row out and never return. He thinks of that time he and Madi stood on a beach together, clinging to the last shred of hope that Silver might be alive. He misses her, the wide, generous smiles like she would give him, like shafts of sunlight piercing through clouds. The way he felt so _still_ when he was with her. So much of him was restless, relentless, ever in pursuit of something. But when he and Madi were alone together, he had felt as if he could just _be_.

“Tell me more about Madi,” Thomas says, on a lazy morning when they are curled up together. Thomas’ mouth presses sweet kisses onto Flint’s shoulderblades, and Flint feels suffused with the pink light of dawn.

“She reminds me of Miranda,” he says. “She quoted _Don Quixote_ to me once. ‘ _Too much sanity may be madness_.’ Shocked me so much I couldn’t say anything.”

Thomas laughs, ticklish puffs of hot air against Flint’s nape.

“She’s so young,” Flint says. “Yet so incredibly confident and poised. She would have made a great queen of her people, but…” He frowns. “God knows where she’s gone with Silver, now. The war was as important to her as it was to me. I avoided ruin because of you.” He rolls to face Thomas. “I could only walk away and _live_ because of you.” He sinks the pads of his fingers into the soft flaxen hair by Thomas’ temple, his palm cupping Thomas’ ear. “I worry about her. All the work she had done to free the slave communities of New Providence. All of it was for nothing. I cannot pretend to know what it must be like for her to walk away from that.”

“If she is as determined and resourceful as you say,” Thomas says, “I am sure even now she is doing what she can to help those who are enslaved, wherever she is. She must know that to do something, no matter how small a thing, is better than to do nothing.”

Flint bites his lip. _There_ —another thing that has been gnawing at him. “What are _we_ doing?” he asks. “Holing ourselves up in this farm in the middle of nowhere? Meanwhile there are plantations full of slaves all around us, and they’re growing in size every day.”

“James,” Thomas says, gently, tucking away a strand of Flint’s hair. “You have been fighting your whole life. It is not a bad thing, to rest. Or you will run yourself to the ground, and then what good is that to anyone?”

“We wanted a better future, Thomas,” Flint says. “Where is that future?”

Thomas’ eyes are damp, like cornflowers glistening with morning dew. “I think perhaps,” he says, at length, “it is already something considerable that we are making a future together, for the two of us. It is nothing so radical as what we once dreamt, I concede, but… is it not worth something?”

At this, Flint shivers like a reed in the wind, tears springing to his own eyes. Oh. Yes. That’s right. It is no revolution. It is no war against an empire. But… this. This, his scarred body pressed hip to hip with Thomas’ worn frame. This, their house, their little farm, their bed where they lie together and sleep till the sun rises every morning. 

This is some kind of victory, too.

* * *

Three years pass like this, without event. And then one day, Flint walks out of his house, and there’s Silver, sitting on one of his pumpkins.

Flint’s milk pail hits the ground. It’s empty—he was just heading out to fill it. He stares at Silver, and Silver stares back. Flint’s whole body begins to shake, his chest heaving. He doesn’t know whether he is laughing or crying, and then Silver is up in an instant, throwing one arm around him. “You look fucking amazing for a dead man, you know that?” Silver says, his voice by Flint’s ear so warm and rough and _beautiful_.

“Who says I’m dead?” Flint asks, baffled.

“I do,” Silver says, sounding frustratingly smug, removing his arm and hopping backwards a step, and Christ, Flint wants him, wants him now and forever. “Captain Flint is dead. Drank himself to death in Savannah. Everyone knows the tale. In the New World, and in the old one, too.”

“You killed me,” Flint says. _You_ kill _me,_ he thinks. Just to have Silver looking at him again with those keen blue eyes makes him want to start digging a grave for himself.

Silver grins. “I killed Captain Flint, and that man looked _nothing_ like you. You’ve got to be at least ten years younger than him.” His eyes drift down Flint’s face, and Flint can _feel_ that gaze lingering on his lips, and he can’t fucking bear another second of this.

He steps toward Silver and he kisses him, right there outside the house, at the edge of the pumpkin patch. He kisses Silver, feels the way Silver sways into him. He grabs hold of Silver’s shoulders, steadying him, or steadying himself—he can’t tell. His own knees might buckle any moment. Silver’s mouth tastes like the sea; he smells like ship’s timber. Wood and salt. Flint is vibrating out of his own skin. Silver’s moustache and beard feel so _fucking_ good against the bareness of his face.

Silver breaks away first, a handful of Flint’s shirt still grasped in his fist. There are tears in his eyes. “Thomas is with you?” he asks.

“I’m right here,” Thomas says, emerging from the doorway behind and startling Flint and Silver both. “You must be Mr Silver.” He strolls casually towards them, and Flint relishes the expression on Silver’s face, Silver’s wide eyes and gaping mouth.

* * *

Silver helps himself to the goat’s cheese tart on the kitchen counter and asks Thomas, “He looked like this when you two first met?”

Thomas smiles. “Yes. In a handsome blue uniform, too.”

Silver raises his brow, waving his slab of tart around in the air. “Now that part, I could do without. I’ve had enough of the fucking British navy and its army for the rest of my life, truly.”

Thomas inclines his head playfully in Flint’s direction. “You wouldn’t say that if you actually saw James in uniform.”

Flint feels his face heat. “When are you going to tell us what you’ve actually been doing the past three years?”

“Spreading the story about your death, for one,” Silver says. “We rescued most of the Maroons before anyone thought about invading the island and re-enslaving them, and we spent a long time relocating them to different places with Max’s help. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best we could do in that moment. Then we moved to England and got married. Took over a little run-down tavern in Bristol, helped to smuggle some runaway slaves out of the country, send them on their way home if they wanted. We were always planning to come back here, but not before we managed to locate where bloody Billy Bones had buried the cache he stole from you. So eventually we tracked him down. Unfortunately we scared him to death.”

“Billy’s dead?” Flint says.

“Yes,” Silver says. “Really, I claim you drank yourself to death, but Billy’s the one who truly did that. He was not doing well when we found him, and well, Hands showed up and Billy just clean gave up the ghost.”

“But you found the cache, in the end?” Flint says.

Silver nods.

“So where’s the cache now?” Flint asks.

“It’s buried behind your house,” Silver says.

Flint splutters halfway through a sip of tea. “Don’t tell me you spent all of last night shovelling dirt in my backyard and I didn’t have a clue.”

Silver shrugs. “I’m afraid so.”

Flint can’t believe it. He was a light sleeper, once. Apparently not anymore. He furrows his brow at Thomas. “Come now, you know I’ve always slept like a log,” Thomas says, raising his hands helplessly.

Silver asks Thomas to give them the room, and Thomas obliges, and then Silver is regarding him silently, nibbling on the goat’s cheese tart, pastry crumbs dusting his moustache. Flint steps nearer, taking the tie out of Silver’s hair and combing his fingers through those curls. They’re sticky and crusted with salt but Flint doesn’t care. Silver’s face makes him think of starlit nights at sea.

Silver finishes the tart, and Flint slowly brushes those flecks of pastry from Silver’s beard with his fingers. He kisses Silver again, softly.

Silver takes hold of his hand, his blue eyes intent and serious. “I asked Madi once whether I would be enough for her, if we had to walk away from the war. All my life I hadn’t belonged anywhere. I had never had a home, and I found her, and I wanted her to be my home. I wanted to belong to her. But it wasn’t until it was just the two of us, running a fucking tavern in fucking Bristol, that I realised that what a stupid thing it was to ask of her. I missed you every goddamn day. I love her, and I missed you. What right did I have to want to be enough for her? And it finally occurred to me that it was all right if I didn’t want to ever have to choose between you and her.”

“I missed you too,” Flint says, squeezing Silver’s hand fondly. “And I miss her. You’ve only been here for half an hour and I’m already remembering how much easier it is to deal with you when she’s around.”

Silver snorts and presses up flush against him and kisses him bruisingly hard, tugging at his hair and nipping at his lower lip, as if to make him pay for the offence.

* * *

Silver writes to Madi, gives her Flint’s address and asks her if she might come and join them.

As they wait for the letter to traverse the seas and for Madi to heed it and make her journey here, Silver helps Flint and Thomas harvest the pumpkins and bring them to sell in the market. More often that not this means that he simply sits on the ground with his back against one of the remaining pumpkins and watches Flint and Thomas work, and tells stories about the motley guests who came to his tavern in Bristol. Men who bragged about having encountered and survived pirates such as Edward Teach and Charles Vane and Captain Flint.

“I’m not sure most of them were telling the truth,” Silver says. “But if they could see you now…”

“What are you implying?” Flint asks, sawing away at a vine with his knife without paying much attention to what he’s doing. He is distracted; he often is, when Silver is just sitting right there, hair blowing in the autumn breeze. 

Silver looks up at Flint with a smirk. “You fit right in with the pumpkins, shall we say.”

Flint glares at Silver. Thomas sidles up to him and bumps his shoulder. “I think you’re a very magnificent pumpkin,” Thomas says.

Flint’s jaw twitches. “Not you too,” he grumbles.

Then Thomas touches his hand and says, “Oh, you’re bleeding.” He cradles Flint’s hand, bringing it up to his lips, and kisses the tip of Flint’s finger, licking away the scarlet beads of blood, and Flint swallows, eyes darting between Thomas and Silver, feeling like he’s suddenly been placed near a roaring fire, every vein simmering. He hasn’t felt like this with Thomas, not since they reunited. What he has with Thomas now—it’s different. It isn’t this kind of heady, intoxicating desire.

But with Silver here too, everything is suddenly brand new and searing.

“And you’re looking riper by the second, too,” Silver says, voice molten as he holds Flint’s gaze.

Flint hears Thomas chuckle, feels the hot press of Thomas’ mouth on his neck. “Yes, I think we shall have to harvest you any minute now.”

Flint groans. God, the people he loves are so fucking ridiculous.

* * *

By the time Madi arrives, the pumpkin patch is just an empty stretch of brown soil, and they are eating pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie every day. Flint is the first to spy Madi from the window while he’s heating some soup at the hearth, and he calls to Silver, who clatters down the stairs hastily and lopes out of the door. Flint follows him shortly. It’s chilly outside, and he should have put on his coat, but he feels himself warm at the sight of Madi and Silver embracing and kissing.

“Captain,” Madi says, nodding to him, and Flint shoves a hand through his hair awkwardly.

“Will you and Silver ever stop calling me that?” he says. “I haven’t been near a ship in three years.”

Madi laughs, and Silver says, “No. You’re going to be our captain for the rest of our lives.” It’s such a careless declaration of his devotion that it feels like a fucking hurricane just swept Flint up off the ground.

He grabs Silver’s sleeve, and says, “I’ll hold you to that.” He can’t keep his voice from sounding intense and crackling with heat, like the low rumble of thunder from dense slate clouds.

Madi nudges his side and says, “You must hold me to that, too, Captain,” and Flint feels as if all the jagged edges of him have been sanded away. His soul is a smooth sphere that could keep rolling on to the very edges of the universe.

He feels Thomas’ hands at his waist, the solidity of Thomas’ presence at his back. “Captain? No, that sounds all wrong to me. You’ll have to be my lieutenant forever, I’m afraid.” 

Flint’s heart trills. He turns around, sees the affection creasing the skin around Thomas’ eyes, and Thomas plants a quick kiss on his lips, before turning to Madi and introducing himself.

“I’m afraid you missed the blazing orange glory of the pumpkin patch though,” Silver says, tapping the ground with his crutch. “We’re also calling our good old captain Pumpkin now.”

“We are most certainly _not_ ,” Flint says, blushing at the memory.

“You’ll be here to see the pumpkins next year, won’t you?” Thomas asks.

“I believe I will,” Madi says.

* * *

Flint spends his evenings listening to Thomas and Madi talk about books, contentedly whittling away at pieces of wood with a small knife, his back against Thomas’ shoulder. The wood shavings fall in his lap. Silver chops vegetables and occasionally makes a clever remark about whatever book is being discussed, even if he claims not to have read it.

Silver’s cooking has improved immeasurably over the past few years. It’s now not only harmless and edible, but positively delicious, although Flint won’t tell Silver that. Thomas does, though, often, and Silver is so encouraged by the praise that he cooks more often than Flint does.

One night, he is up in his room, and Silver comes in. “They just won’t stop talking about the _Odyssey_ ,” Silver says. “What are you making, anyway?”

“I make lots of things,” Flint says. “I made this the other day.” He picks up something from the table by the side of his bed, hands it to Silver. “For you.”

Silver stares at the tiny wooden sculpture that fits in the palm of his hand, and Flint fiddles nervously with the bedcover.

“Oh,” Silver says. He sits down on the bed next to Flint, and puts his head on Flint’s shoulder. “You know… I can’t remember if I’ve ever received a gift my entire life. And you give me _this_?”

“You don’t like it?” Flint says.

“Jesus, Flint,” Silver says, palm closing around the sculpture, and then opening again. “I… I love it.” He tosses it up and catches it deftly. “Again?” he says, and Flint laughs and kisses Silver’s hair.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’re the one who’s just given me a gift, Captain,” Silver says, running the tip of his thumb along the fin of the miniature shark in his hand. “What are you thanking me for?”

“For everything, I suppose,” Flint says, and Silver kisses him.

“You’re honestly embarrassing,” Silver says, then chases his jawline with more kisses. “What else do you make? What’s that?”

“It’s for Madi,” Flint says, pushing the item in question behind his pillow.

“What’s for me?” Madi asks from the doorway. She moves so quietly, she’s constantly catching him off guard. She enters the room, and Thomas appears too, a moment later.

Flint hesitantly reveals the jewellery box, presenting it to Madi in both hands. It’s a simple box, not too big, only one layer divided into five compartments within. He has put many days of effort into carving the relief on the lid. It is bordered with vines and flowers in bloom, pumpkins on the bottom corners, and in the middle, at a diagonal slant, is something that looks like it could be an oar, or maybe a shovel. Underneath he has chiselled the letters _nostos_ in Greek.

“Homecoming,” Madi reads, her fingers tracing the shape of the letters. “We were only just speaking about this.” She looks up at Thomas, and then at Flint. “About which of Homer’s poems we preferred. War or _nostos_.” There are tears in her eyes, and her breath hitches on a suppressed sob. “This is the loveliest thing I have ever seen. Thank you.” She grasps Flint’s hand.

“Well that’s certainly better than this bloody shark _I_ got,” Silver complains with a teasing grin, but there’s a dumbfounded glaze to his eyes and Flint is filled with so much private pleasure.

“‘ _Where there is great love there is often little display of it_ ,’” Thomas says, reaching out to brush away the tear that escapes and trickles down Madi’s cheek. “On this one point I think we shall all four of us prove Cervantes wrong.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are much appreciated! <3 Find me [on tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) where I am honestly just in flames over everything that is S4.
> 
> (Also, hopefully this fic is just the start of a whole verse?? I mean, if people want more of this ridiculousness, that is. Do let me know if you'd be happy to read more of this.)


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